Pentagon Will Pay for Sex Change Surgeries Through Early 2018 — And Is Open to Exceptions After Cutoff Date

Gerry Broome/AP19 Sep 2017

The transgender “interim guidance” rules set by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis block additional soldiers from using pro-transgender policies set by former President Barack Obama, but do not repudiate the revolutionary ideological claim that men and women can change their legal sex by adopting an opposite-sex “gender identity.”

The memo also allows an open-ended commitment to cosmetic “sex reassignment” surgeries. It announces that the DOD will continue paying for soldiers to undergo these surgeries up until March 22, 2018, and will allow exceptions after that cutoff date “to protect the health of an individual who has already begun a course of treatment to reassign his or her sex.”

Mattis’ continued acceptance of the gender-trumps-biology claim — despite the formal August repudiation by President Donald Trump — is a concern for Elaine Donnelly, founder of the Center for Military Readiness. “The vocabulary is very similar to [Obama-era] documents setting forth plans to have transgenders in the military … [even though] it is consistent with the memo that the President put out on August 25,” she told Breitbart News.

The Obama-like language in his September 18 “interim guidance” is especially concerning because Mattis has not explained which officials will draft the new regulations, she said. “We don’t know who will be in this group that the Secretary of Defense is establishing, and that causes some a lot of concern because people are policy,” she said.

Under Obama, Pentagon deputies quietly and gradually imposed a pro-transgender policy via advisory consultants at Rand Corp. think-tank and the Palm Center, she said. “We do know what the President wants: Will the people selected [for the job] carry out the wishes of the president?” she asked.

Mattis’ policy is seen as a slow-motion repudiation of Trump’s policy by some transgender advocates.

“It is clear that there is broad opposition within Congress and military leadership to Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s discriminatory attacks on transgender troops,” said a spokeswoman for the pro-transgender Human Rights Campaign.

The “interim guidance” rules released September 18 by Mattis accepts the revolutionary claim that every person’s sex is not determined by their biology, but is decided by their choice of “gender identity.”

Service members who have completed their gender transition process and whose gender market has been changed in DEERS [a Pentagon datebase] will continue to serve in their preferred gender while this Interim Guidance remains in effect … [and personnel may not be discharged] on the basis of a gender dysphoria diagnosis or transgender status.

The military’s endorsement of the gender ideology is important because it could be cited by courts or the Congress as justification for declaring that all people have a legal right to switch their sex, even without surgery or changing appearance. If the courts or Congress change the definition of a person’s legal sex, then the myriad civic institutions which Americans gradually evolved for either of the two sexes — such as single-sex bathrooms, sports leagues, targeted school curricula, protected homeless shelters, education grants, contract set-asides and various civic groups — must be forced to accept both males and females, said Donnelly.

Already, the military community — and soldiers’ rights to raise their children — have been roiled by Obama’s policies, which require female soldiers to give “dignity and respect” to biologically intact transsexual men who join them in their shared shower rooms. Those policies also extended the transgender ideology to the children of soldiers by offering to provide “sex-change” hormones and drugs to children.

Overall, the Mattis guidance freezes Obama’s anti-sexes policies and bars the recruitment or exclusion of people who want to live as members of the other sex. It extends Obama’s policies for soldiers who have been approved to act as if they are members of the other sex, and it even continues medical treatment for soldiers trying to switch sexes even after the March 2018 deadline set by the President. It says:

Medical care and treatment: Service members who receive a gender dysphoria diagnosis from a military medical provider will be given treatment for the diagnosed medical condition. As directed by the memorandum, no new sex reassignment surgical procedures for military personnel will be permitted after March 22, 2018, except as necessary to protect the health of an individual who has already begun a course of treatment to reassign his or her gender.

In-service transition for transgender service members: The policies and procedures in DoDI I300.28 dated July 1, 2016, remain in effect until the defense secretary puts into effect DoD’s final guidance.

Separation and retention of transgender service members: Service members who have completed their gender transition process, and whose gender marker has been changed in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System will continue to serve in their preferred gender while the interim guidance is in effect.

An otherwise qualified transgender service member whose term of service expires while the interim guidance is in place may, at his or her request, be reenlisted in service under existing procedures.

In July, Trump jumped into this dispute by rejecting Obama’s transgender ideology and backing the nation’s two-sexes culture and laws. In August, he formally directed the Pentagon to restore the two-biological-sexes policy but gave Pentagon officials until February 2018 to restore the two-sex, male-and-female policies discarded by Obama and his transgender-ideology allies.

The new interim guidance rules will operate until Pentagon officials develop new rules by Trump’s deadline — unless the transgender advocacy groups persuade judges or Congress to accept their gender-beats-biology ideology.

Congress is also a problem, Donnelly said, because Democrats are pushing to include the transgender-before-biology legal principle in the 2019 defense budget. A proposed amendment by Sen. New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins was sidelined, but the issue may be revived in the House-Senate by GOP Sen. John McCain, who chairs the Senate’s armed services committee, Donnelly warned.

However, Texas Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and can stop any McCain amendment pushing the transgender legal principle, she said.

“The Senate Armed Services Committee has had zero public hearings on these controversial directives, all of which endorsed the reality-denying, unscientific LGBT delusion that gender is ‘assigned’ at birth and can be altered by changing a person’s appearance and “gender marker,” Donnelly said in a statement on the issue. She continued:

Human “sex change” is biologically impossible. [Sex] is identified at birth, not assigned, and every person’s gender-determining DNA chromosomes exist in every cell of his or her body.

However, in mid-July, 23 liberal House Republicans joined with the Democrats joined in the House to vote down a pro-two-sexes amendment by Missouri GOP Rep. Vicky Hartzler. That amendment was backed by Thornberry. Click “more” in this graphic to see the list, which inadvertently and improperly included Florida Rep. Brian Mast.

Advocates for transgenderism say each person’s legal sex is determined by their chosen “gender identity,” not by their biology. These advocates also argue that the federal and state government must support people who say they are “transgender” by legally forcing other people to treat them as members of the opposite sex and to refer to them with opposite-sex pronouns.

In contrast, polls show that most Americans want to conserve their two-sex society, in which laws and civic practices are intended to help the two equal sexes manage their different and complementary average desires and capabilities. Polls show that roughly one-quarter of Americans support the progressive claim that biology is subordinate to chosen “gender identity,” despite intense media pressure in favor of the pro-transgender, anti-sexes campaign.

There are very few “transgender” people. For example, advocates say from 1,320 t0 11,000 people in the military are trying fully or partly to live like members of the other sex, within the military population of 1.3 million full-time soldiers, sailors, marines and air force personnel. Fewer than o.3 percent of Americans wish to live as members of the opposite sex, according to a study of the 2010 census.

Trump’s formal opposition to the transgender ideology is pushing Democrats to make their unpopular transgender ideology an issue in the 2018 elections. However, Obama has said twice that his 2016 support for the ideology contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the presidential election.